The Republican Party's nationwide washout in Tuesday's midterm elections — the first nationwide vote of Donald Trump's second term — may not mark the end of the damage to its brand, according to a report in the New Yorker. Instead, the publication suggests the GOP now faces the Gerald Ford-style anchor that weighed down Republicans after another historic scandal: the Watergate era.

After his own Republican elders confronted him over his conspiracy to obstruct the investigation into the 1972 Watergate break-in, President Richard Nixon resigned and handed the office to Vice President Gerald Ford. Mere weeks later, on September 8, 1974, Ford issued Proclamation 4311, pardoning Nixon for any crimes he might have committed as president. But Nixon's undeserved absolution remained a stain on the party, which only looked more soiled for having absolved its criminal-in-chief — and Democratic President Jimmy Carter went on to claim the White House in the 1976 election despite an improving U.S. economy, the New Yorker reports.

Then, as now, Americans appear wary of a party too eager to bury the crimes of its scandal-plagued White House leader. Despite Tuesday's rout, New Yorker writer David Remnick — the magazine's editor since 1998 — argues that the public will continue to hold the GOP in contempt for its too-eager forgiveness.

"The most consequential result of the midterms has been to break the fever of Trumpism and to diminish its threat to democratic institutions, to personal and civil liberties, and to decency itself," Remnick writes. "Trump's unique brand of lurid authoritarianism has finally lost appeal, and he has lost the plot. The election was also a vindication for those who had refused to submit. We are all too familiar by now with the many politicians, law partners, billionaires, C.E.O.s, university presidents, and others who cowered before Trump. Part of the reason we will survive the Trump era is that many more did their work honorably. Judges, civil-rights lawyers, academics, election officials, curators, artists, and countless ordinary citizens stood up. Their resistance to Trump's bullying, corruption, and heartlessness has gained new political force."

Yet even after the midterm trouncing, the White House issued a "PSA" on social media: "Trump is still your president." That message, Remnick suggests, will serve as "useful information" for an American public long weary of the administration's open corruption and the party's willingness to tolerate it.

"While he remains in office, his party is unlikely to rid itself of its cultlike obedience," Remnick writes. "J. D. Vance, his would-be successor, believes that he can win in two years simply by acknowledging the folly of going to war with Iran, while still aping the cruelty and dogma of his mentor."

In Vance's view, Remnick reports, "Donald Trump will ultimately decide who's going to be the Republican nominee" — a dynamic, in his telling, that signals the GOP remains clutched tighter within the hand of Trump's villainy than anything else.

Still, Remnick cautioned, Democratic inroads will carry the party only so far without reasonable improvement to the economy and to U.S. voters' interests. The "Watergate babies" were the wave of Democratic freshmen elected in the 1974 midterms, held just months after Nixon's resignation, and Remnick invoked their cautionary history: "The Watergate babies arrived in Washington in 1975 resolved to transform American politics; when Jimmy Carter, a moderate Democrat, won the Presidency, their prospects seemed to brighten even more. Yet, just six years after their great electoral triumph, Ronald Reagan, a right-wing ideologue, was elected President and the Republicans captured the Senate. The reformers of 1974 found themselves defending gains they had expected to build on. They had helped change Washington, but the country was changing in ways they struggled to understand."

The incoming Congress, Remnick argued, will succeed "not through an obsession with retribution and punishment but by delivering on the myriad hopes and demands of the voters who elected its members."

"The Democrats of 2026 have won an extraordinary opportunity. What they make of it will determine what this election means," Remnick concluded.